L. Goode

“You came in dreams, you blonde bipolar—
I did not start; I did not—well, I never
would have thought such a call unlikely,
but it interrupts and irritates as I perform
my little rituals, the modes that make
a place the place you live in.  Your slump
and I were in Madrid, or Nice, or Prague—
no, despondent in Wisconsin.  I watched
you through the window as you clutched
him on the deck; you keened and listed,
hoodwinked in despair.  I knew I’d like you.
Droop-eyed carom, hearing television
squabble as the teacher called your
name, harboring your notebook, writing
Jane, Jane, Jane—”

I mean then words—as opposed to content. I care what the poem says, only as a poem—I am no longer interested in the exterior attitude to which the poem may well point, as signboard. That concern I have found it best to settle elsewhere…I think the poem’s morality is contained as a term of its structure, and is there to be determined and nowhere else. Only craft determines the morality of a poem.

–R. Creeley, “A Note” [Nomad, Winter-Spring 1960]

“I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too much, and laughing, and watching the men. That was how I met her, in a bar on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with. That was how it began, that was all it meant to me; I am not sure now, in spite of everything, that it ever really meant more than that to me.”

–James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

This is my blog. I actually think blogs are kind of gay, but my boo bought me my domain name for Christmas (ain’t he a catch?), and, you know, we’re all hot in the pursuit of techno-notoriety.

So far I feel pretty much baffled–I might go as far as “overwhelmed”–by the array of digitized choices and responsibilities before me, the administrator, or “admin,” as the invisible hand of WordPress has so coquettishly nicknamed me, that coy thing.

Who the hell am I supposed to address this address to?

Also, I’m totally that gaywad who’s going to put her poems up on her website. I promise to refrain from the use of the following words, except when their context is plainly ironic: infinity, eternity, euphoria, ambrosia, diaper, adult diaper, crackhouse, hollandaise, and soul. Words I reserve the right to use liberally include, but are certainly not limited to: box, green, fuck, chthonic, punctuative signifier, dilettante, aestivate, whiskey, and mariners.

Just so you know, whoever You is, that game could have gone on a lot longer, and I cut myself off. Just like I sometimes have to cut myself off Cheez-Its, whiskey, and occasionally mariners.

So, my cherished, lonely, anonymous, clearly hard-up in many ways reader, that–blink and you’ll miss it–was my first post.